Windows Next, a Reality Check
There has been huge volumes of excitement around leaks of Windows 8. Screenshots and builds have been poured over by bloggers around the world with even some of the most popular websites such as Engadget and NeoWin posting new features as fact! The truth is very different and I’d like to try and bring some sanity to the debate. Microsoft have been directly involved in some leaks websites closing down in recent weeks. That has left other websites nervous but others continue unashamedly. Windows8News tries to take a more grown up approach to the development of the company’s new operating system. Indeed when I visited Microsoft’s UK headquarters just before Easter I spoke to them directly about Windows 8. In the time since, I’ve been in regular contact with friends at the company’s head office in Redmond and I’ve gained an extremely good understanding of why the company is progressing with the next version of Windows in the way it is. Internally, the next version of Windows is still being referred to by its codename, Windows Next. This is because there’s no final naming been taken place. This is something that won’t be finalised until closer to the company’s Professional Developers Conference in September when it’s widely expected the company will unveil the OS and announce the timescale for technical and public betas. Although the name ”Windows 8″ does seem likely, it’s by no means in the bag. The company is annoyed about leaks and rumours posted by third-party sites. Microsoft have refused to comment on the sources of the leaks, though they are clearly coming from hardware vendors who need test-builds to make sure that hardware drivers will work. This does make it much harder to determine the exact source(s) of the leaks but you can be certain that Microsoft are having ongoing discussions with those hardware vendors. This isn’t a problem faced by Apple where the hardware is all managed in-house. This company therefore isn’t susceptible to the same manner of leaks as there are no, or at least very few, third-party hardware manufacturers to work with. But, why is it that Microsoft are trying to squash the rumours and leaks about Windows 8 / Windows Next so venomously? The answer to this one is quite simple, and this is because they want to be able to try and manage the expectations people have about the OS. So what does “managing expectations” actually mean? Well let’s have a look at the last two Windows betas, for Vista and Windows 7. Vista was a very complicated product, indeed direct parallels can be drawn between Vista and Windows Next because they were both incredibly bold departures for the company, the only other one of this type being Windows 95. Windows Vista introduced many features that never made it into the final version of the operating system that, during the beta process, many thousands of people got very excited about. The most prominent of these was WinFS, a relational file system to replace NTFS. WinFS, short for Future Storage, would have allowed any type of information to be stored along with the relationships that data had to other things. You can still find information on WinFS online here. Indeed, WinFS was a feature that many people are still calling for today. Microsoft pulled it from the release candidate of Vista because they couldn’t get it to work reliably but it was never forgotten. The end result of this was that a great many people were disappointed in the end release because of the lack of inclusion of this, and many other features that were also pulled because Microsoft simply ran out of development time. Then the beta of Windows 7 came along. This was much more tightly managed and there were far fewer leaks than we’re seeing now. Even so there were features that never made it to the final build that got a great many people excited. Top of my list for Windows 7 was Guest Mode. This was a special feature that Microsoft never got to work successfully, in fairness Apple pulled an identical feature from OS X around the same time as they couldn’t get it to work reliably either. Guest Mode would have allowed people to use your computer but would have rolled back any system changes and software installs they made when they were logged on, and would have deleted any files they’d have put on your computer. It was a brilliant idea, Apple thought so too. It never made the release candidate for Windows 7 though and when Apple implemented it, it began deleting the main user’s files as well so they pulled it with an update. These are just two of the many features in Vista and Windows 7 that never made it to the final builds that generated a great deal of attention at the time (I’d be very interested to hear your comments about what other features in the betas you were looking forward to as well). It’s a simple case of managing people’s expectations for the OS then and making sure that when you do finally deliver a product, you can also deliver all the features you want to. This has always been the case with Microsoft and they don’t make any official announcements about features they can’t deliver. This is why we’ll hear nothing until September this year at PDC. I’m not making any excuses for Microsoft here and I’m certainly not on the payroll (just to head off those comments) but I do have contacts fairly high up on the inside of the company and I can assure you that what I’ve written here is exactly the strategy that they’ve currently got in place. I can understand it too. If a major new ‘feature’ in the next version of Windows, such as the inclusion of the Metro UI or the kernel reinstall, doesn’t work properly, it won’t be included. That will result in a great many people feeling very disappointed and the economic, promotional and corporate ramifications of that could be huge. Microsoft isn’t a group of enthusiasts in a basement remember, it’s a multi-billion dollar worldwide business with shareholders who want a sound return on their investment. All of this is why when the technical beta of Windows 7 came around, the product had been ‘feature locked’. As regards the build and image leaks themselves I urge you to remember this. The hardware manufacturers only need very early builds where the kernel and driver model are finalised. They do not need any access to the UI or other features, and the builds that Microsoft have internally will without doubt be very different to anything we’ve seen leaked so far. What I can say with absolute certainty is that some features will be dropped from Windows 8 in the coming year. Which ones though remain to be seen but not everything will turn out as Microsoft hope. Here at Windows 8 News though we’ll continue to bring you the latest news about the OS and with a hotline to the people inside I can assure you that the moment there’s anything official to say, we’ll say it!